U.S. Feature | Hispanic/Latinx

L.A.’s “Brownout” in Hollywood Depictions

Despite comprising half of the population of Angelenos, Hispanics have been largely absent from the center of Hollywood narratives using the City of Angels as its backdrop. The Guardian examines the reception of the depictions that have managed to make it to the big screen, a brief history of Hispanic actors’ relationship to Hollywood, and the tales of bigotry encountered in an industry whose whitewashed screens have often drained the nation’s most vibrant and multicultural cities of color and complexity, further distancing those at the margins from the idea of “Americanness.”

Outlas Outreach

The Ongoing Insecurity of LGBT Ghanaians

A relatively stable constitutional democracy, Ghana has seen the beginnings of official outreach to its LGBT citizens in recent years as it has signed on to pro-LGBT international accords and treaties, but new research from Human Rights Watch (HRW) reveals ongoing persecution and gender-based vulnerabilities. Though rarely enforced, a law criminalizing same-sex relations that emerged from the country’s colonial legacy has led to the political and corporal endangerment of LGBT Ghanaians, exposing them to intimidation, violence, fears of public exposure, and little to no recourse to law enforcement protection. Lesbians, bisexual women, and trans men have faced especially high levels of violence and labor precarity, and anti–domestic violence laws have done little to protect them given the lack of trust in the legal system. In response, HRW conducted interviews with LGBT Ghanaians to track insecurity across a range of social, legal, and economic domains and issued a set of recommendations to improve protections for the community.